Loading...
Hillsborough's voting system faces scrutiny after delayed vote count
Published: November 3, 2010
TAMPA - Another election, another computer glitch, another vote count delayed.
While the results of many high-profile state and local races were called Tuesday night, Hillsborough County elections officials were still counting ballots into the next day.
Election officials said the delay – which didn't affect the outcome of any races – was caused by problems with the memory cards on optical-scan voting machines at early voting stations in West Tampa, New Tampa, Temple Terrace and other locations.
The glitch forced elections workers to manually rescan about 38,000 ballots, more than half of the 77,000 early votes cast in late-October. The process took about six hours to complete, and by 1 a.m. Wednesday, officials had tallied the last of the early ballots.
But the computer glitches marred an otherwise flawless election in one of Florida's most populous counties – where voter turnout topped 46 percent – and raise questions about the effectiveness of Hillsborough's problem-plagued optical-scan voting machines.
During the primary election, the vote count was delayed for hours because of problems transmitting the results from polling stations across the county. Officials attributed that to heavy rains that caused problems with telephone lines used to transmit the results.
This time, however, elections officials couldn't blame the weather.
Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Earl Lennard said he will meet with representatives from the Toronto-based Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., the county's election machine vendor, in the next week to figure out why the memory cards didn't work.
"We're going to make sure this doesn't happen again," he said Wednesday.
Still, Lennard said he was confident that all the votes were counted.
"The machines worked, 99 percent," he said. "But the voters deserve 100 percent."
Dominion spokesman Chris Riggell said company technicians haven't determined what caused the problem. He wouldn't speculate on whether faulty hardware played a role.
"We are looking at this issue and trying to determine what occurred," he said.
Riggell said the company – which supplies voting equipment in 32 Florida counties and 13 states – didn't experience any major issues with other machines on Election Day.
Neighboring counties use similar voting systems, but reported few problems. In Pasco and Pinellas counties, election officials uploaded the early voter and absentee ballots shortly before 7 p.m. and had them tabulated before the live results began arriving.
Hillsborough, which has had a history of problem-plagued elections, has gone through three voting systems since the state made national news over hanging chads in Palm Beach County during the 2000 election.
Punch-cards were followed by the security-challenged touch-screen computer machines, which were scrapped by the state Legislature in 2007 amid concerns about the lack of a paper trail and a dispute over a congressional race in Sarasota County. That led to optical scan machines that produced the paper trail required by Florida law.
Hillsborough County, one of the last in the state to purchase the optical scan machines, awarded its $6 million contract to Texas-based Premier Election Solutions, which was purchased earlier this year by Dominion voting. In Hillsborough, the machines have experienced problems in nearly every election.
In the 2008 primary, a computer glitch delayed the vote count for several hours even though only about 10 percent of the county's 650,000 voters cast ballots, one of the lowest turnouts in recent memory. Premier later accepted blame for the problem.
A few months later, in the general election, memory cards on the machines overloaded and the results couldn't be tabulated. It took more than two days for county elections workers to tabulate the votes and post the results of several close races.
After that election, state and county elected officials called for an investigation into the delays, but that was largely abandoned after then-election supervisor Buddy Johnson was voted out of office. Now, some county officials are raising new questions about the voting equipment.
"There's no excuse," said Hillsborough Commissioner Mark Sharpe. "We spent all that money on those machines; they should work. I think heads are going to roll over this."
